White House Clears Path to Regulate Greenhouse Gases

Last month the Environmental Protection Agency officially found that greenhouse gases, by causing global warming, endanger public health.

Yesterday, the EPA finding cleared the White House Office of Management and Budget review process. This may sound yawningly bureaucratic, but it's actually the crucial step to enabling the agency to regulate and cap greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. It's what the Bush administration side-stepped and stalled for a year and a half -- and the Obama White House and EPA are accomplishing in the administration's first 100 days.

EPA is declining to say when it will make an official announcement. Rumor has it that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson will do the deed next week, on Earth Day, April 22. After that, the proposed finding is subject to a 60-day public comment period, and two public hearings, before it can be finalized.

This could presumably bring on a slew of new project reviews, particularly energy and construction projects, to gauge their climate-damaging impacts. It's possible that the fear of such horrors may actually move the traditional opponents of such regulations to support Congressional carbon caps as the more business-positive alternative.

Says ClimateProgress, "So what exactly does this decision ultimately mean for what EPA and team Obama can do restrict greenhouse gas emissions? Ultimately, the agency will be able to issue regulations that deal primarily with new sources of substantial amounts of greenhouse gas emissions — new dirty coal plants, this means you! ...It also will apply substantial pressure on Congress to act."

"Some energy industry officials generally support cap-and-trade (though the details can be far more prickly)," OMB Watch writes. "But, as we will likely see when EPA unveils its endangerment finding, the rhetoric surrounding regulatory action will be far more combative. Hopefully, such rhetoric won’t deter EPA from moving forward."

And at The Vine, the enviro-blog of The New Republic, some astute analysis:

The finding will clear the way for the agency to start regulating carbon under the Clean Air Act, although it's still unclear what rules will emerge. Odds are the EPA will grapple with vehicle emissions first—as we noted last week, the Obama administration may try to reconcile California's tailpipe-emission laws with the new federal CAFE standards to create a single, strict national fuel-economy rule.

After that, the EPA could turn its eye toward carbon regulations for stationary sources like power plants, though there's no fixed timeline for this, and no one knows what shape those rules will take. By some accounts, EPA head Lisa Jackson wants to hold back on new regulations in order to synch efforts with other climate policies (including, presumably, ongoing congressional efforts to pass an energy bill). In any case, new greenhouse-gas rules would take years to finalize, though groups like the Chamber of Commerce haven't wasted any time warning that the EPA is plotting to reduce the economy into rubble as we speak...

For now, the finding will mostly put pressure on Congress to pass its own greenhouse-gas rules instead. Ed Markey, who's co-sponsored the big climate and energy bill in the House, put it bluntly on Monday: "Do you want the EPA to make the decision or would you like your congressman or senator to be in the room and drafting legislation? ... Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation." Even Republicans like Ohio's George Voinovich have been pondering much the same thing. As much as some members of Congress might prefer to kill cap-and-trade and ignore the climate issue entirely, that's not an option at this point.

Image: By net efekt, via flickr